The Uncertain Value of School Knowledge: Biology at Westridge High

This article describes and analyzes the surprisingly uncertain value of school science in
an academically prestigious high school at a time when reform in science education is
again a national priority. In a cultural analysis focused on school lessons, it traces
how school participants produce a veritable absence of science in science classes and
how the production is sensible, or understandable, given their particular institutional
and social circumstances. What emerges, too, is the extraordinary reach, or complexity,
of ordinary school lessons. However unevenly or intricately, lessons move from teacher
plans to student responses, beyond events in classrooms to the culture of a school, across
contemporary hybrids of divergent curricular rationales to long-past historical debates,
while traveling between subject matter knowledge and status politics. Seeing their reach
allows us to understand the long-standing muddlement of knowledge in U.S. schools,
as well as what we can do about it.

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Reba PageUniversity of California, RiversideE-mail AuthorReba Page is professor of education at the University of California, Riverside where she studies and teaches about curriculum, interpretive research methods, and the sociocultural foundations of education. She is the author of “The Tracking Show,” in Curriculum, Democracy, and Liberal Education: Essays in Honor of H.M. Kliebard, edited by Barry Franklin (Teachers College Press, forthcoming).